I’m not entirely sure why, but it strikes me that The Big Lebowski and The Catcher in the Rye have a fair amount in common. I can’t exactly put my finger on what it is, and I may be off as its been several years since I last read The Catcher in the Rye. Sort of a wandering, semi-aimless main character / protagonist who is easy to relate to, but not necessarily look up to. He’s both profoundly self assured and entirely shake-able. Quirky and largely driven by impulse and outside influences. A certain reoccurring metaphorical theme around falling or feeling like you’re falling. Brushes with the sex industry and art/artists. Unfulfilling / odd sexual encounter, include ones centered around a certain voyeurism and also one night stands. An attempt at denying or avoiding responsibility for the majority of the piece, but ultimately sort of accepting it, but mostly meditating on it. Questions about identity and the inability to correctly identify it and phonies both real and perceived. Being beaten and left curled on the floor by a stranger. A conflict between the real and ideal worlds that the character imagines himself in. Lots of religious overtones that are never really directly addressed. Lots of profanity, to the degree that it occasionally seems purposely excessive. And as much as all of that, the fact that I really like them both, but always end them feeling like I didn’t totally get it. Like there’s something I missed, or that even though I pretty much know what it’s about, I can’t really put my finger on it or explain it.
05
2009
Dr Seuss Schuyler
It occurred to me recently that the plot and theme of The Sneetches by Dr Seuss and Black No More by George S. Schuyler are basically identical. (Lots of spoilers ahead, all from my best memories of having read each 5+ years ago.)
The Sneetches is a children’s story about creatures called Sneetches. Some have stars on their bellies, some do not. The ones with stars look down on the non-star bellied and leave them out of their games and such. A man comes along with a machine that can put stars on the bellies of non-star belly sneetches, for a price. All non-star bellies get stars. Sneetches who originally had stars want to get theirs taken off, to be different from the newly star bellied. Our entrepreneur informs them that his machine can do that too, for a little more money. Eventually, all the sneetches are going through the machine at various settings, until there’s such a mix of number of stars on bellies that no on can tell who was who any more. They all play together and decide belly stars are a dumb thing to divide people up over.
In Black No More, a Harlem Renaissance book, a German scientist invents a way to turn black people into whites (yeah, the book doesn’t really clarify what exactly that means). This then slowly sweeps the country until nearly everyone is white, and the book ends with rumors that rich white people are now paying for a process to turn them black and race starts breaking down as a social category in America. Granted, Black No More also has more of a main protagonist, who mostly spends his time aimlessly wandering and whoring about, which isn’t so much in Dr Seuss’s version, though Schuyler did fill a couple hundred more pages than Seuss.
Anyone else have childhood books that they’ve found echoed in another piece of not so child oriented literature?